Fair enough, in that case using an HTML search engine for Links that is of any actual good quality nowadays is something I am unaware of.

DDG offers multiple frontends including DDG HTML

I definitely agree that more constructive discourse needs to take place instead of some needless fights that happen way too often.

About Brave and the view some lemmy users express about it, I feel some of the distrust is valid while the way many express it is with no other regards to the good there might be or without any technical knowledge behind words being shared around. Exactly how you mentioned Google being awful at privacy but great at security.

Thank you for taking the time to write all this.

First of all, you do touch up on some good topics with sources and I appreciate that. However I would like to say that you may have either oversimplified or misunderstood some concepts you talk about here. Just so we’re clear, the whole topic of privacy/security is vast and knowing everything about it all is impossible so this is not an insult but a simple remark.

While I will not tackle everything you mentionned, mainly because you have your opinion, which is valid, and you do bring up good points, I will point out the last two topics you bring up.

Debian is indeed less secure than a stable release Linux distribution based on sane defaults, however they do backport security issues into their older kernel which is how older kernels are maintained. So while yes, they may still use kernel 6.1, they also may have backported 6.12 vulnerability fixes.

The last topic you end up with is the constant fact that some “groups being at odds with each other” and “privacy being at odds with security”. Groups being at odds is not all good and neither is it all bad. Just like Lemmy or federation, it brings diversity in an ecosystem that needs said diversity.

You yourself bring up project 1 and compare it to project 2 at first while they are so different that comparing the two is like saying that an orange is blue. Many people will stop there and you went a deeper and properly laid out that it wasn’t the case but you fail to do so some place else.

Like I said, all of this is a very vast topic. However, while you have “fights” and groups being at odds with each other for sometimes good or not so good reasons, it brings out one of the best things in open source sometimes. “I dont like you or the way you handle that project so I’m going to make my own fork of it and do it my way”.

Thank you for your time and I do hope your text will help some people out.

In the rare case where you are actually not a troll, let me put it simply.

Your previous post was blocked for the behaviors of certain individuals in the comments, including you and the topic itself which was as good as spouting: “Why not use Google drive for sharing media? It’s free and there is way less hassle than what all of you have been doing for decades. I am right you are wrong.” .

Is it possible that plenty of people are wrong and have been doing things wrong for a long time? Yes, it is possible. In this case, bring good arguments, show proof, and debate. Do not bring baseless beliefs into an argument and say you are right about it.

It is indeed somewhat frustrating not to be “able” to share the whole adventure for the sake of privacy but that’s just another part of the lonely journey that is personal privacy in itself.

I think what most people lack is a roadmap or a goal. From your post, you achieved you goal and that’s great. More often than not, people spend years looking at all the horror stories and all that they can put in place without sitting down and looking for a goal they themselves wish to get to.

I like this. I think it may be one of the only post I have ever seen that shows where a privacy minded folk came from and their journey to end up in a place they’re comfortable at. Way too often stories about one’s privacy journey is them being in the pit of despair (understandable) or those crazy stories of how someone who spent years researching privacy and hardening their device ended up picking windows and all their old habits from all those years ago because it was too much for them.

On that note, great job. I’m happy for you and wish you a good time on your regular (perhaps minimal) maintenance.

The link to Z-Library itself is one of the legitimate ones from what I know so I wouldn’t worry on that side too much.

PDFs have a few exploits that could infect a system. However they are rare and not efficient especially if the intent is to infect as much machines as possible.

If you don’t have much technical knowledge to analyze the files yourself, I would recommend you open the PDFs in Virtual Machines without any acess to the internet or opening the files only when you have disconected your device from any acess to the internet.

Tools like the one mentionned by someone else in the comments would be good to prevent from having to worry about a potentially malicious PDF. Various tools are around to convert a malicious file lile PDFs into regular “trusted” PDFs (said tools flattens everything making it impossible to select text or click any URIs included). I would look up the trustworthiness of some of those tools first (to not try and avoid malwares by installing one).

That was way too long of a comment but I hope it could ease some of your worries.

Yes, as long as you practice good OPSec.

The first mistake you made was to ask about it. While logical to ask since you probably didn’t know, you now have an increased risk of linkability. Is the risk enough of a threat? Your threat model and OPSec will determine that.

If your goal is wanting to avoid being identified, planning starts before doing any prior actions.

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In your case, you added something, it was a salad with pepper and salt during a time where you were craving something in particular.

What was crazy to me about the story I told was the poor tomato and carrots were unseasoned, bland, resting in the saddest plate I’ve yet to encounter, while the person eating it was considering what was in front of them a meal.

(Not sure why someone would downvote you for your comment by the way)

I knew someone who would eat a tomato for dinner with a few slices of carrots. Nothing baked, just a plain uncut tomato and slices of carrots.

I’m talking a functionnal human being, knowing the concept of cooking and the ability to walk to their kitchen with such a “dish” as they would call it. Not vegetarian either. They did like meat and whatnot. Saddest “meal” I’ve ever had the horror to lay my eyes upon.

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Setup:

Download Seal and go to Settings > General. From there click on the update yt-dlp to make sure you’re on the latest yt-dlp build. No head to Custom command > New template. Put your label of choice and in the “Command template” section put in your custom command.

To create a good custom command I highly recommend you browse TheFrenchGhosty’s Ultimate YouTube-DL Scripts Collection’s Watch on Mobile Devices Script to get an idea of what you would want (I’ll give an example template later on based on theirs).

Once your command is done click “Done”. If you have not configured the output directory yet, go to Settings > Download directory > Custom command directory (Usually you’ll want this in the Download folder. On android: /storage/emulated/0/Download/<Name-Of-Your-Choosing> Make sure to have “Configure before download” under Settings > General, enabled. From there, exit the app.

Go to the app you want to download your media from (ie. Browser, Youtube). If you are in a browser, long press the url bar of your link and click “Share”. You will be presented a menu to share the selected link. Long press on the Seal icon marked as “Quick Download”. You will be presented with a way to pin the app. This will allow this specific app you’re in to have Seal be presented right away when you want to share a link and be prompted with the “Configure before download” menu. From there, select “Commands” as “Download type” and click on the template’s label you created earlier. You can now click “Download” and enjoy.

You could avoid the hussle of setting up a custom command and tweak a few things in the app’s offered options. I just prefer to use my usual commands that I use to download on my phone as well.

As for the command, here’s a short template I just made from modifying TheFrenchGhosty’s scripts as mentionned above (haven’t tested it but should theoritically work):

yt-dlp --format "(bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1])+(bestaudio[acodec^=mp4a]/bestaudio)/best" --force-ipv4 --sleep-requests 1 --sleep-interval 5 --max-sleep-interval 30 --ignore-errors --no-continue --no-overwrites --add-metadata --parse-metadata "%(title)s:%(meta_title)s" --parse-metadata "%(uploader)s:%(meta_artist)s" --no-write-description --check-formats --concurrent-fragments 4 --output "%(title)s - %(uploader)s (%(upload_date)s).%(ext)s --merge-output-format "mkv" --throttled-rate 100K

Not all the info here is relevant for each use cases but I hope this gives ideas and helps even a bit.

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If you do not download often or don’t mind the longer time it might take you can do the following.

Before the URI (URL if you prefer) of the post, put view-source:, you can then proceed to search with the “Find in page” tool, or however it might be named for your android browser. In the case of this site you’ll usually search for mp4 files so just search “.mp4” and you should find the file you want to download.

Sometimes you might find different file extensions on the same site for the same type of post because the uploader’ files are directly the ones being posted and not converted by the site itself. In this case you can browse the source a little by searching for a potential name of the file or a HTML tag.

If that is too much of a hassle, I believe applications like Seal (found on FDroid) are able to download from such websites. There’s no reason for it not to since it uses yt-dlp.

Hope that helps.

PS: If you decide to use Seal I could share a very fast workflow if it happens to work.